News Posts

After more than a year of restoration work, the classic habitat dioramas in the Hall of North American Mammals, which reopens this fall, seem more vibrant and realistic than ever. While the diorama scenes haven’t changed, decades of scientific research and discovery are offering new insight into the stories they tell. Below, the second in a series of posts, this one about coyotes and wolves, on the new science behind the hall.

What do we really know about the diversity of life on Earth? Biologists have named 1.8 million species out of an estimated 10 million, according to Museum Provost of Science Michael J. Novacek. In this podcast from a recent SciCafe, Dr. Novacek discusses how researchers are using cyber-technology to explore the evolution and organization of life as never before.

The SciCafe, “The Whole-Life Catalog,” took place at the Museum on October 3, 2012.

In 1896, a Museum-led team began excavating ruins of an Ancestral Pueblo settlement in New Mexico’s Chaco Canyon. That work would yield tens of thousands of artifacts, including the jet frog pictured here, and generate one of the most intensely researched collections of its kind in the world. It would also inspire an act of Congress, called the Antiquities Act and signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt, under which the site and others like it would be protected as national monuments.